


Red Thread Smile

by AconitumNapellus



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (TV)
Genre: Christmas, Friendship, Gen, Loneliness, Rescue, Snow, Snowed In, Winter, blizzard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:07:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21953410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AconitumNapellus/pseuds/AconitumNapellus
Summary: Illya is stranded in a trapper's cabin on Svalbard as Christmas approaches. There's only him and Sven. The trouble is, Sven is dead.A Down The Chimney Affair story for pactnmmt, who requested a gen story with the prompts: Northern lights, Loneliness, Last minute rescue…
Relationships: Illya Kuryakin & Napoleon Solo
Comments: 20
Kudos: 46





	Red Thread Smile

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pactnmmt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pactnmmt/gifts).



When he finds the ink, it’s frozen. He has to put it on top of the stove, in its glass jar, and wait for the heat to make its way through. While the black ice is turning to liquid he moves around the cabin, touching this and that, dragging his finger through a little dust and leaving a clear streak, picking up books and putting them down again. The window is so iced up again that he has to breathe on it and scrape to make a hole. Through the hole he sees nothing but whirling snow.

He’s been here for a day. He feels half a guest, half at home. A guest because this isn’t his cabin. At home because there’s no one else alive to claim the place, and everything outside is a wilderness of hostility.

He walks around, touching things, getting to know them, starting to feel, by touching them, that they’re half his.

It’s good to be warm at last. The stove is so hot by the time he remembers the ink is there that he burns his fingers lifting it off, and it gives a little hiss when he opens the lid. There isn’t a cartridge pen or a ball point to be found in the hut, only an old dip pen, but that’s all right. Holding it makes him think of his school days. Getting ink on his fingers. Sucking it off, later, when he’s daydreaming.

 _Day Two,_ he writes on the first blank page of the open exercise book, between the thin grey lines. Maybe he really is back in his school days. _I got here yesterday but I’ve been settling in. I didn’t find the ink until now – on the windowsill, of all places, and frozen solid. So now I can make some kind of record of what happened, why I’m here. I’m lucky to have found this place at all. Or maybe my benevolent travel companions knew it was here. I doubt it, though. I wouldn’t credit them with that much mercy. Svalbard is not for the faint of heart._

He really was lucky to have found this place. He had been walking for an hour through the snow, freezing cold despite his arctic gear. The wind seemed to cut through everything, and his fingers ached and burned. At first the hut was only a little smudge behind a slipping veil of snow, a more solid darkness against the kaleidoscope darkness of snow in the twilight dark of noon. He thought it was a rock. If the dark smudge were a rock, it would provide some shelter, so he made for it.

As he got closer, he decided it was too angular to be a rock. Even blurred by the snow, he could see the sharp edges. He could see another vague shape nearby, something else dark, but odd, hovering, almost.

As he staggered closer, he saw the rock was a hut; weather-worn, board-built, with a thin iron chimney sticking up from the pitched roof. Tar paper was ragged at the eaves, tugged by the wind. A lean-to porch made a blocky shape at the front. The other structure could have been a lookout platform, or a washing line, or a combination of both, a framework with garments hanging from it and flapping in the wind. A weird sight, here, miles from any civilisation. But it didn’t matter, because the hut was shelter. Even a locked door could be kicked in.

 _I’m trying to fix the radio_ , he writes in the exercise book, _but I suppose if it were easy to fix, poor old Sven wouldn’t be dead._

He’s only speculating that the man might be called Sven. The dead have no names. They only have words that people remember them by. They’re not really names any more, not attached to the body to which they formerly belonged.

He found the man lying in a narrow bed in the cabin. The door hadn’t required kicking in. It had been jammed at first with a packed ridge of ice and snow, but the handle had turned quite easily into the lean-to, and then into the room beyond. The temperature inside the shack only felt warmer because of the lack of wind. It had been quite dark inside, and it had been a little time before he had discovered the body. First he had found the oil lamp, then he had found the matches, then he had lit the lamp, and then he had seen what was in the bed.

Sven was lying there with his eyes open, lips curling back. It was impossible to tell how long he had been dead, because he was frozen solid. There was a cylindrical little stove at the side of the room, but the fire was dead too.

Sven was thin and bearded. His open eyes were blue, his hair dark. He was wearing long red underwear and a pair of socks and not much else. It must have been warm enough in the shack when he died, but it would have grown cold very soon after. The moisture frozen on the inside of the window was probably the moisture of Sven’s last breath.

He could have been dead for days or weeks or months, but later Illya found the tattered exercise book that had been used as a journal or a note taker, or something, at least, that required the date to be written above entries. It could have been written in Danish or Swedish or Norwegian. He hasn’t enough of any of those languages to tell them apart. He can, at least, understand the date of the last entry. _24\. oktober 1968_. He doesn’t know how long before death this was written, but now it is December.

 _They dumped me on the shore,_ Illya writes in the exercise book, the same exercise book in which Sven had been keeping his journal. _Best way to kill someone without firing a gun. They said I was eating too much of their food, which would be hard on the few pieces of bread a day they gave me. At least I still had my gear, but if I hadn’t found this hut, I’d be dead now. I’m eating better here than I did on their ship._

At least there isn’t seasickness on land. At least he isn’t shut in a tiny metal room that stinks of diesel and urine and vomit, his own urine and vomit, lurching as the ship rolls, wishing they’d just use one of their precious bullets to put him out of his misery. The clean cold ashore had, at first, been wonderful. The stillness of the ground had been wonderful. Maybe it was land, maybe it was ice shelf, but it was clean and it didn’t move underfoot.

A few minutes later the cold had hit, and he had started walking, shaking off the dizzy, spinning feeling in his head, searching for anything that might sustain human life before the cold seeped his life away.

 _I seem to be on Svalbard_ , he writes. _Longyearbyen must be somewhere around here but I’m damned if I know which way I ought to go, if I’m on Spitsbergen, even. I think there are hills, maybe mountains. If the weather clears I’ll go out and look for signs of life, but I could die trying to walk to civilisation, so I’m better off here, for now. Sven has kindly left me a lot of canned food and there’s plenty of coal. I’d give a lot for fresh greens, but beggars can’t be choosers. He’s also left me a rifle, of which I’m very glad. If I do have to walk out of here it will help in any conversations with polar bears._

He doesn’t have anything against Sven personally, but he wasn’t keen to share the cabin with him, not once it was warming up. He manhandled him outside on that first day and set him on a chair by the front door, where he froze solid again. Irreverent, maybe, but he’s learnt to be both reverent and irreverent of death in equal measure. He has no equipment to bury him, and, sat like that, Sven feels like something of a guard dog, like a kind of companion. Like something less dead.

  
  


((O))

  
  


_Day Three. Judging by a night and a day’s consumption, I have enough coal to last about a month, if I use it carefully. I could do with lasting until February, when the sun will start rising, but I don’t think that will be an option. I don’t know how my erstwhile friend acquired his groceries. There’s no sled hereabouts, and no dogs, and I haven’t found skis. I can hope that he has it delivered, and when the delivery comes I will be rescued like Rapunzel from her tower, but for all I know the man was a miser and only used one lump a day, or cancelled all deliveries for the foreseeable future. After all, I found him frozen in his bed._

He potters around the cabin, trying to find things to do, things to keep his hands busy. There’s a rip in his jacket, and the white stuffing is puffing out, so that’s the first, most important task. When he tries to walk out of here he’ll need his clothes to be in good repair.

He finds an old treen box filled with cotton reels, needles and pins, and a pair of almost blunt scissors. They’re sharp enough to cut cotton, so he sits by the glow of the oil lamp, feeling for all the world like an old Victorian housewife, as he sucks the end of the cotton and tries to thread the needle.

An old Victorian housewife would put him to shame. He doesn’t have his reading glasses, and the eye of the needle is a blur. Eventually he gets the cotton through, after a good deal of cursing, and he makes a workmanlike job of the rip in his coat.

 _I wonder how long it will take for boredom to set in,_ he writes. _I may take to sewing. I wonder if they’ll find me like Sven, in a year’s time, stiff as a board, surrounded by examples of petit-point of increasing detail, reflecting my growing madness._

He almost scratches that out with the black ink. Why should he go mad? Isn’t that defeatist, to assume that he won’t be rescued; that he’ll die, eventually, of starvation or cold, just like the last occupant of this place?

Sven might have died of anything. He might have had an aneurysm, a heart attack, an insidious cancer. Anything might have carried him off. It wasn’t starvation or cold, unless he were too ill to keep the fire going and open a can of food. There’s no evidence of a lingering illness, certainly. The dishes are washed, mostly. The rubbish is cleared away. Maybe he just died, like some people do. There’s no point in hauling his frozen corpse back in here for a post mortem. Not unless he gets really bored.

Maybe he could make something, with needle and thread. He’s never really experimented with sewing. Sewing is women’s business, something his mother did, his grandmother did. It’s something functional, but not a function of man. But sitting here, drawing the needle in and out through the soft fabric, he finds it curiously satisfying.

There are lots of things he could occupy himself with here. He could sketch, maybe. There’s enough paper, there are pencils. Just, perhaps, not enough vistas to draw. After all, if you’ve sketched one blizzard, you’ve sketched them all. And it’s dark, of course. He has an instinctive expectation that the sun will rise, at some point. It won’t rise now until mid-February.

He could write, like he’s writing now in this journal, but what would he write about? A story of being marooned on a desert island? Palm trees and sunshine and coconut water to drink? He’s already writing about being marooned in a different kind of desert. Cold, and the sun never rises, and the sky never gets light. The clouds blot out even the scant light of stars, and now, at midday, the only light hitting the snow is from the oil lamp, when he twitches the curtains at the window and tries to see something other than whirling flakes.

The wind is like banshees.

 _Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,_ he thinks to himself. _Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not._

Well, that isn’t true. A lot of harm can come from grains of ice being battered about by forty mile an hour winds. The sounds are of screaming, unearthly things. It sounds like a great creature out there, shaking this fragile hut with a giant paw. There are demons in the wind out there.

He shivers. Midday, and it could be midnight. Midnight could be midday. It’s all the same. He looks at his watch and puts it to his ear and checks the ticking. It’s a fast little tick, steady and reassuring. There was a clock on the cabin wall, but it had wound down, so his watch is the only thing he can rely on. He’s set the clock by his watch. His time is his own. If it’s wrong, both timepieces are wrong.

 _Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears_ , he thinks.

Why does he know that speech of Caliban’s off by heart? He always felt a little kinship. There are the noises outside, the isle full of noises. The humming of his watch in his ear.

_And sometime voices._

No. There are none of them. No voices at all here, except his own, and if he speaks aloud his voice sounds small against the howling wind. The wind has a kind of voice, but it’s nothing human.

He opens a can of soup and pours it into a little blackened pan, and puts it on top of the stove to heat. There’s some rye bread that he found in the porch, frozen into bricks. Six little bricks of rye bread. That’s not a lot of bread, so maybe Sven had been expecting a delivery soon. Or maybe Sven has a skidoo out there somewhere, buried beneath the snow.

He can’t rely on the idea that someone will materialise through the storm. In a place like this, independence is everything.

  
  


((O))

  
  


_Day Four. The weather is somewhat better today. Still cloudy, but the snow has stopped, for now. I took the opportunity to step outside for a look around. Dark, of course. I took the oil lamp with me but it doesn’t light up much. I walked up a little rise, snow as deep as my hips in places, and looked for lights. Couldn’t see any. I think there are mountains out there. Great dark things, just a bit darker than the sky. They could be mountains, or clouds. I did discover one thing, though. I thought that odd framework had washing hanging out on it. Of course it isn’t washing. It’s animals. Man’s a trapper. I should have realised that as soon as I saw the hut. That’s meat hanging out on the frame, frozen solid like so many popsicles. I suppose there are skins around somewhere. I should have realised._

It’s a ghastly frame, that thing. It’s hard to tell the creatures apart, hung up high out of the reach of polar bears. Maybe he’ll be glad of the meat, though. A whole freezer on demand. Seal blubber can keep you going for a long time. Some of them are seals, probably. Maybe some arctic fox, maybe some bear. He should avoid the fox, he thinks. There’s something deep-seated in his psyche that tells him eating fox would be wrong. Some kind of taboo.

He climbed onto the top of the platform, while the weather was calm, his hands stiff and cold in their gloves, his face freezing. He stood there on the icy, snow-crusted wood, and looked around, with the carcasses of animals surrounding him like a hanging palisade. He couldn’t see any more from up there than he could lower down. No lights. Clouds that might be mountains. Mountains that might be clouds.

He potters around the cabin with the lamp in his hand, investigating the wrack of his host’s life. There are plenty of beer bottles stacked up in a corner. There’s a box of tobacco, and rolling papers. Plenty of cans of food; meat and vegetables and some of soup. A sack of rice; the best carbohydrate, Illya supposes, for lasting a long time. There’s a sack of flour, too. Rye flour. When he digs his hand into the softness, and smells it, he thinks of his childhood, his mother working in the kitchen, the dust of the flour in the air. Maybe Sven made his own bread.

There’s a shelf of books. He takes them off and looks at them, flicking through and finding recognisable words. He wishes he’d taken the time to study more of the Scandinavian languages but he had never expected them to be that useful. He finds, though, a dictionary. Norsk-engelsk, the cover says. He can read _those_ words well enough.

He takes it out and puts it on the table. It’s not as if he doesn’t have time to kill here.

He sits down with Sven’s journal in front of him, and tries to translate the first page. It takes time, though. Not all the words are in the dictionary. Not all the words are legible. It’s hard enough reading a stranger’s handwriting, let alone when it’s in a whole other language, when the letter forms learnt from infancy are subtly different. All the familiars are taken away.

It’s boring reading, too. Something about the weather. Something about the food. A mention of the animals he killed that day. That is all.

He puts it aside after a while. Without his glasses it makes his head ache, especially bending over the pages in the lamplight. He puts the kettle on the stove and boils up water and powdered milk and coffee powder. He sits and drinks, and listens to the wind. He gets up and looks out of the window, and sees it’s still dark. Of course it’s still dark. This night will last for months.

He comes back to look at the radio, to try to work out how it is broken, and how to fix it.

  
  


((O))

  
  


_Day Five. I am heartily sick of this wind. There was a day of grace, but then the wind got up again in the night – I mean, in the hours between going to bed and getting up, because it’s all night. When I looked out in the morning the air was full of snow. When I went out to empty the pot it was like being hit with a sandblaster. It’s a ghastly place when the blizzard is in full swing. Howls like demons. The cold pushes in through the walls as if they’re made of paper. I sit next to the stove with a blanket round my shoulders. I don’t want to use too much coal._

He puts the pen down and blows warm breath on his fingers, then holds them over the stove to warm. Today is very cold.

He wonders if Sven had any fingerless gloves. Those would be useful. He puts the kettle on to melt ice, which will eventually boil, and tugs the blanket more firmly around his shoulders. He starts to poke around the single room again. He finds only a few articles of clothing. There are gloves, a pair made of soft sheepskin, but not fingerless ones. Maybe he could cut the fingers off. He has his own gloves already.

He tries using the scissors from the sewing box, but they’re too blunt. He looks in the drawer of kitchen utensils. He’s sure he saw – yes, there it is. A little whetstone for sharpening knives. He uses it to sharpen the scissors, and then cuts each fingertip off both gloves. He slips his hands in, flexes his fingers, and sighs. The soft lambswool clings against his hands, reflecting his warmth back into his skin. It’s a good feeling.

He looks in the kettle and sees the ice is only just starting to turn to water. He shuffles it on the stove, as if that will help, and turns to the room again. There is a wooden box under the bed. He hasn’t looked at that yet.

He kneels down on an old rag rug and slides the box out from under. He opens the lid, and a smell of camphor and old wood and paper rises into the air. He holds the lamp so he can see. His heart gives a little jump. It seems so intimate. In the box are photographs, black and white, a couple in colour. There are envelopes with handwritten addresses and franked stamps, a little stack tied with a dirty string. There’s another pair of scissors, this time larger, and really sharp. And there are dolls.

He picks one up and turns it in his hands. A little rag doll, made from scraps, wool for her hair, clothes made from material obviously taken from a girl’s or a woman’s clothes. They have blue eyes and red lips. There are three dolls, but only two are finished. The third is naked, and she is missing her red thread smile.

Illya holds it in his hands. He brings it to his nose, and inhales. She’s stuffed with sheep’s wool, he thinks. He can smell lanolin and smoke. He holds her and turns her over and over again, a little naked fabric scrap of a girl. It’s an odd feeling. Something left unfinished. Something Sven must have been meaning to do. It’s a connection – but to what? Who was Sven making these dolls for?

He takes the photos over to the little table by the stove and puts the lamp down and starts to leaf through. An older couple, standing in a garden; he bald, in shirt and slacks, she wearing a dress and an apron. Both smiling, both looking worn with work, but content. They’re standing in front of a house made of boards. They both look distinctly Scandinavian.

He turns the photo over. There might be something written there, but it’s in pencil, and very faint.

Another photograph. A man in soldier’s uniform, a photo perhaps taken during World War One. He looks proud. He’s staring out, straight at the photographer, a riding crop, perhaps, tucked under his arm. Perhaps it’s not a war photo, but just of that era. Norway didn’t take part in the First World War. He tries to identify the uniform, but it’s hard, looking at an old sepia photo like that. There’s nothing on the back.

Another photograph. This one can’t be very old at all, going by the clothes. There’s a woman of ethereal blondness, her hair shoulder-length and loose, smiling openly, her arms around two small children who are just as blond. He feels a little tug. His mother looked like that. He looked like those children, as a little boy. He feels so far from everything.

He shuffles the photographs back together. He feels as if he’s intruding on the inside of someone’s life. He thinks of Sven, out there on that wooden chair, stiff and frozen, and feels a jerk of guilt. Maybe he shouldn’t have propped him up like that. But he doesn’t know what else to do with him. He can’t keep him inside, can’t bury him, doesn’t want to lay him down somewhere and lose him under the snow. Perhaps he could get him up onto that platform, which must be meant to keep bears from the meat, but he isn’t sure if he could manage to manhandle a full-size, frozen corpse up there on his own.

 _I feel very alone today,_ he writes in the journal. _As if the entire of civilisation had vanished in the storm. As if I were the only living being in the world. I haven’t even seen a bear._

It’s a large, aching feeling, a spinning feeling. There’s a fear right at the heart of him that feels like the kernel of ice sitting in the kettle, still waiting to melt. He’s afraid of never seeing a human face again. Never hearing a voice again. Dying, like Sven, alone and far from everything that makes the human being a social animal.

 _Napoleon_ , he thinks. By now Napoleon is surely looking for him, if he doesn’t think him dead. Even if he does think him dead, he’ll still be looking. He knows his partner.

  
  


((O))

  
  


_Day Six. I’ve taken up sewing. Was it inevitable? It must have been Sven’s hobby, I’m sure. It was those three little rag dolls, and the photographs in the box. The rag doll without the smile. I couldn’t leave her like that. Naked, and without a smile. I think Sven must have honed his skills over time. I don’t know how many of these things he’d made. But I’ve managed a red smile, at least, with the red thread in the sewing box. I will start on the clothes soon. I’ve found his bag of scraps – a huge bag, under the bed. There’s plenty of choice._

There’s a smell of summer in the bag of fabric pieces. Is it real, or something conjured from nostalgia? He pulls out a piece of a pale lawn print, and holds it up, and he feels as if he can see the woman in the photograph wearing it, the fabric swishing as she moves. He can see her smile. He can smell summer flowers. He pulls out something pink with little red flowers printed on it, stained a little in one place, and he thinks of a little girl, eating an ice cream, perhaps, being scolded for letting it melt onto her clothes.

He will use the pink with red flowers for the doll’s dress, he thinks. Perhaps he can find a scrap of white for an apron. Maybe somewhere there’s some lace.

He almost laughs at himself. What is he? A woman? An elf in a story, creeping in in the night to finish a dead man’s work? Who is he making the doll for? There were two children in that photograph, girls, he supposes. Maybe now there’s a third. Perhaps that is who the doll is for. Are they Sven’s daughters? Is the woman his wife? Maybe he will never know.

He sits with the doll in front of him, looking at the crooked red smile that he took so long to sew. It’s not good enough. Compared to the other dolls, this mouth is a scar. He will have to unpick it and try again. He will have to get more practice. The clothes will have to be finely cut, finely sewn. They will have to be thought out, not rushed.

He puts those scraps carefully aside. He can’t make a mistake with this. It has to be done right.

  
  


((O))

  
  


_Day Seven. Dark outside, of course. I thought again about making a break for it, but it would be insane. I don’t know where I am or which way to go. It stopped snowing for a little while and I tried looking to see if there were any light reflected on the cloud, something from Longyearbyen, but I don’t know. It’s so hard to tell. What might be a bit of light could just be my imagination, or the aurora reflecting from further away. It started snowing again then and soon I couldn’t see more than a few feet._

_The doll is waiting for her clothes, but I’ve decided I can’t make them yet. I’ll have to practice on something else first. My stitching is too clumsy. I’ll make her look terrible. I’ve propped her up with her sisters on a shelf, for now, and they watch me go about my day. Is it crazy that I’ve given her a little shawl, to keep her warm? To keep a rag doll warm? But I have. I couldn’t leave her naked up there. She’s wrapped in a piece of felt, and very cosy she looks, too._

He finds himself talking to the dolls. That isn’t good, he knows. But it’s a long time since he had a proper conversation with anyone. On the ship there weren’t conversations at all; just barked orders, and attempts at interrogation, and grunts. It was when they realised they weren’t going to get anything from him that they put him off here. He’s grateful. They could have dropped him overboard. He wouldn’t have survived five minutes in that water.

He thinks of the poor souls on the _Titanic_ , falling into that icy April Atlantic water. Maybe it was merciful, in a way. There are worse ways to die. He’s seen worse ways to die.

He goes to the door, into the little lean-to that makes a kind of airlock, and stands at the outer door with the lamp. It has been dark for so long. It’s unbearable. The lamp highlights little sparkling flakes of snow that are falling, drifting, whirling in the air. The wind isn’t high today. It’s another calm day, but the clouds are as thick as ever. The snow is puffing up in a soft layer, like whipped egg white.

Sven is still on the chair by the door, covered in a thin crust of snow. The little, soft flakes are settling on his hair, on his eyelashes, his nose. He makes an eerie sight. Illya stands there and regards him. Dead as a doornail. More dead, because a doornail has never had life. Sven’s heart must have beaten. He must have been warm as new bread. He must have eaten and laughed and cried, he must have shit like any other man, like any live creature.

Perhaps those girls in the photograph were his. Perhaps that was his wife. She won’t know that he’s dead. No one knows but Illya. To the rest of the world, Sven is still living. So maybe a person doesn’t really die until a person knows they are dead. If Illya died now, he would go on living for months or years, perhaps for ever, if no one found his corpse.

The loneliness is so sharp inside him that it hurts. He has a momentary fantasy, a thought that he could carry Sven’s cold body inside and warm it up, and that would bring it back to life. Someone to talk to. Someone to share with. Such needful things for a social being. He had never thought of himself as being that social, but the longer he goes without company, the more he craves it.

He goes back inside and sits down by the little table, the warm stove, the glowing lamp. He writes in the journal, _Napoleon, I wish you were here. It would be good to have someone to talk to._

He sets the pen down again. There’s no point expressing wishes like that. Writing them down doesn’t make them come true, not if it’s not New Year’s Eve, not if you don’t burn the wish and slip the ash into champagne, and drink it down. Even that doesn’t really make wishes come true.

He rummages through that bag of fabric scraps again, trying to find some pieces to practice on. There’s something satisfying about sewing, something he had never imagined possible. Something about creating something from nothing, stitching layers together from discarded remnants and making something of use.

He has a vague little plan in his head, and he looks for the colours. He finds a big enough piece of red. He finds bits of yellow. There’s nothing that’s solid gold, but he finds a yellow speckled with a darker yellow pattern. Yes, there’s enough. Not perfect, but it’s enough.

He uses the sharp scissors, pencil, and ruler to cut out a rectangle of the red material. He must hem it, of course. Hemming will take time. He can do that through the day, but he wants to get the pieces right first. He takes the yellow scraps and manages to piece out the shapes of hammer and sickle. He draws them on with the soft pencil, pushing hard, and cuts them out, leaving a little surplus to hem. He places the pieces together, pins them, and smiles. Soon he will be able to raise his own flag in the stripping wind.

He sews all day, stitch by little stitch, getting neater with each one. He pricks his fingers on the needle and curses, but the blood doesn’t show on the red cloth. Outside, the dark darkens and the wind grows in strength, until he can hear snow being whipped against the walls and window, and he’s glad of the curtains and the wooden walls and the airlock of the porch. He’s so glad of the stove, and the supply of coal. So glad of all the little flames that keep him company.

Eventually, when the night is as dark as the ink in the bottle, he pisses in a can, throws the urine out to the wind, comes back inside, and sheds his outer layers. He slips down into Sven’s bed, under Sven’s blankets and quilts, and turns out the lamp.

In the darkness, he lies there. The wind keeps howling, keeps scouring and scouring at the walls and roof. He imagines it scouring so hard that the snow comes through. He imagines the storm as a great beast batting with its paws at this tiny box he is in. He feels like a mouse.

Tomorrow he must try again to fix the radio. The radio is his only hope.

  
  


((O))

  
  


_Day Eight. Lunchtime. It’s midday, by my watch. Outside it’s dark, of course. I have eaten a fine lunch of blinis and canned herring. Sven was kind to leave me all this food. I wish I could share a meal with him. He has some liquor. I’ve raised a glass to him, at least._

_I finished the flag this morning, and nailed it up on the porch. I can hear it flapping in the wind. I hope my stitching holds up. I hope, if someone appears in this wilderness, they don’t think we Soviets have decided to claim Svalbard. Only this little corner of it. I only claim this hut, and that only while I’m here._

He is pleased with the flag. It makes him smile. It’s childish, perhaps, but it makes him smile to run up his country’s flag outside this place. It’s a sign, an affirmation that he’s here, and alive.

The doll is still on the shelf, watching him, her clothed sisters on either side of her, she in her dark blue felt cloak. He remembers dolls of his childhood, red cheeked, smiling, with traditional costumes. Girls clutching those dolls, treasuring them. This doll’s smile is still crooked, but he can’t bring himself to unpick it. It’s her smile now. Her red thread smile is part of her.

Maria, he calls her. Why? He doesn’t know. The word comes into his head. She is Maria, and her sisters, rather more prim and well-behaved, are Marguerite and Diana. Maria is the youngest, young enough to walk about naked without consciousness that she is doing anything wrong. Her sisters are shocked and constantly tell her to cover up. Maria goes about naked anyway, even in this cold. She doesn’t care about the cold.

 _Perhaps I’m going mad_ , he writes in the journal. _I’m talking to a set of dolls. There’s too much time alone, here. It would be good to hear a human voice._

He sits, after his lunch, with the pieces of the radio on the table, the lamp close to him, Sven’s poor array of tools near to hand. He’s afraid it’s something that just can’t be fixed. A valve gone, maybe, and none to replace it. Or perhaps the battery is simply dead. It’s been a while since he’s tinkered at this kind of thing. It doesn’t help that he doesn’t have his glasses. It doesn’t help when the wires are a soft blur, close up.

He sits there, unscrewing wires, screwing them back in again, testing and testing again. He can’t get a peep out of the wireless. In the end he throws the tools down and stamps away. He stands by the window, heaving breath, trying to control his urge to shout. Then he realises there is no one to hear him shout, so he turns his head up to the ceiling and lets out a raw, primal cry of frustration. He feels ashamed at losing control in front of the girls, who are watching him with impassive smiles. Then he reminds himself that they’re not girls, they’re three bundles of cloth stitched like human figures, nothing more.

Does he want the radio to work so he can tell someone where he is, or just so he can hear a human voice? Even if he could just pick up some station, that would be good. Even if he can’t understand the language. Just to hear a human voice.

He pushes the radio and tools aside and sits down with the dictionary and Sven’s journal, instead. He needs to understand more about this man. He picks an entry and puts a sheet of paper on the table, and copies it out slowly, first copying the Norwegian word, then using the dictionary to find its meaning, and writing that underneath. Slowly he starts to make some sense of the language. It’s like breaking a code.

_Cold today. Below freezing. Two polar bears and a fox. The skins are good. Perhaps I can make the gloves for Anne that she wants._

Who is Anne, he wonders? The woman in the photograph? The mother of those children? His wife?

  
  


((O))

  
  


He dreams of Sven lying in the same bed that Illya’s sleeping in, the bed where he found him. He dreams of him alive but dead, frozen but alive. Illya bends down over him with needle and thread, because his face is blank where his mouth should be. Illya labours over and over again to thread the needle. The needle is unnaturally big, the cotton unnaturally coarse. He tries to thread it, and the cotton slips past the eye, or the cold metal of the needle fumbles from his hand and falls on the floor, and he has to feel over the floorboards to find it, squinting at the blurred lines.

Finally, he manages to get the thread through the eye, and he sits on the side of Sven’s bed, sewing a crooked red smile onto his face, pushing the needle relentlessly in and out of the cold skin that has no opening where the mouth should be. Sven is mute in every way. A little blood wells up, but it is soaked into the red cotton, and can’t be seen. He doesn’t know if it’s Sven’s blood, or his own.

  
  


((O))

  
  


_Day nine. I didn’t sleep well. This constant darkness getting to me. I try to time going to sleep and getting up rigidly, but I’m slipping out of the pattern. Couldn’t sleep last night until well past midnight. Woke up at past eleven, feeling hung over. It could just as well be night. I wake feeling disoriented, not knowing what time it is, what day it is, where I am. I have so many hours until I can let myself sleep again, but I feel drowsy all the time. All I want to do is sleep._

It’s still dark outside. Always dark. He feels as if he were going mad. If only there were light out there, he’s sure it would be better. There would be some definition to the days.

 _The weather is still today,_ he writes. _So quiet. The sound of my nib on the paper feels so loud. Not a thing is moving. Nothing in the world. Clouds gathering sluggishly on the horizon. Another storm in the wings._

The dolls stand on the shelf, watching him

‘I know,’ he says, impatiently, after a while.

He has things to do. He needs to carry another bucket of coal over to put by the stove. He needs to melt more water so it’s ready when he needs it. He could do with washing. But it’s so quiet. So still. He has to stop writing in the journal because the noise of the pen feel so loud. The scratching of the nib is like a scream.

It will be Christmas soon, he supposes. Was Sven planning on spending Christmas here? Was he meaning to get home, to arrive home on Christmas Eve with those dolls finished and wrapped up in his pack? Maybe he was going to appear like Santa Claus, and take his daughters by surprise.

He empties out the bag of scraps again, and rummages through. There are so many pieces in there, so many colours. He could make himself a Christmas. He should act as if he expects to still be here then. It will be something to do, something to brighten up the place. Maybe on Christmas Eve he could take in a chunk of that frozen meat, and have it for dinner. Maybe Sven has some cranberry sauce somewhere. He never used to celebrate Christmas, but he’s grown used to it after so long away from home, in countries where Christmas is the great thing, not New Year. He can celebrate both. God knows, he needs something to help mark the days.

He can make himself a fabric tree. He can make himself bunting. He can make the place look jolly. How odd it will look if he dies.

He pulls out scraps and pushes them around and makes decisions. There’s enough green. There are enough bright colours.

‘What do you think, Sven?’ he asks, turning towards the door.

Sven is out there, outside the porch, frozen stiff. Silent, of course. He takes the lamp and goes out to look. There he is still, sitting in the chair, his arms hemmed by the chair arms, legs like wood.

Tonight he looks very dead. Illya can’t look at him.

He looks up instead. The light from the snow is ghostly. The stars are so bright they look as if someone has punched holes through the roof of the sky and installed bulbs. Someone is burning lime up there, making those points flare in individual, dazzling punctuation marks against the dark. There is the crescent of a moon, and the light from it catches on every facet of snow, making a monochrome world. Nothing seems real. It’s all so still. It all seems flat, no real depth except in the great depth of the sky above him.

Movement catches his eye. Something moving in the dark cold. He catches in breath. As white as the snow around; it is a polar bear, standing on hind legs, paws upraised like a pleading man. It’s by the frame, reaching for the frozen, skinless corpses hanging there. It’s like a tableau, a painted scene.

Illya stands very still. Perhaps he should go for the gun, but he doesn’t move. He doesn’t want to kill this thing. He just stands, and watches. It’s strange how like a man these creatures can look. Up on its hind legs like that, it looks like a man in a fur suit.

The world is black and white. He can’t introduce blood red to that scene.

The air is freezing on his cheeks and nose. His fingers feel numb. He stands, and watches the bear, breathing in and out but making no other move. It stretches up, stretches up again, then seems to accept it cannot reach. It slumps back down onto all fours. Its breath is making clouds of pearl in the strange light of the moon. It turns its head, and looks straight towards Illya.

His own breath catches in his throat. Momentarily, all thought is gone from his head. Everything is empty. His mind is empty as the sky.

The bear can smell him. It’s looking at him, its eyes tiny, dark holes in the white fur. It stands, stares, then takes a step towards him.

Thought returns. He could retreat inside, but he can’t leave Sven there to be torn apart. He’s a frozen hunk of meat just like the other corpses. He should have thought of that before. He never should have left him out there. Stupid not to think of bears.

He raises his arms up, the lamp in one hand. He broadens the stance of his legs, making himself big. He fills his lungs with the freezing air, and shouts a formless, masculine shout, his own animal roar.

The bear stands still, watching him. Then it turns its head again and lumbers away.

Illya waits. The bear is just a pair of rounded hindquarters, swaying slightly. It’s hard to see in this weird moon light. The bear blurs with the snowscape around, and then it is gone.

Illya presses his freezing hands for a moment around the warmth of the lamp, then sets it down inside the porch. He works at the chair in which Sven is sitting. It takes a while to free it from the ice and snow, but he manages. He drags it into the porch, body and all, and closes the outer door. It’s just cold enough in here, he thinks. It will be all right.

He goes back inside. He stands over the stove, too cold to shiver at first, letting the warmth slowly enter his flesh and sink down.

Who is Sven? He gets the photographs out again. He gets the journal. He sits there with the dictionary, trying to piece sentences together. The man doesn’t say much about other people, or much about himself. Sometimes he mentions a few names, but he doesn’t say much. Any more complex emotions are hard to translate.

He flicks through the photographs again. There are more photos of that woman, and of the children. There’s a photograph of a house in a garden. His mind imparts colour. A green-leafed tree growing near the gable end. The reddish colour of the planks of wood that make up the walls. The white window frames and blue sky with a few white clouds. His mind imparts summer warmth. For a little while, looking at that photograph, he can feel the summer. He can remember what it’s like to see sun.

He puts this uncertain evidence of Sven’s life aside again, and starts to plan his Christmas tree.

 _I wonder how long I’ll be here?_ he writes in the journal. _Will I be able to make it to spring, if I eat the meat outside? I suppose I can go hunting. Maybe I’ll get a seal. But I can’t walk to safety if I don’t know where I am or which way to go._

‘What do you think, Maria?’ he asks of the naked rag doll on the shelf.

She smiles at him with her lopsided smile. Her sisters smile serenely. They make no reply.

  
  


((O))

  
  


_Day ten._

He sits with the pen hovering above the paper. He thinks about dipping it in the ink. He puts it down again. What is there to say? This is his tenth day in the trapper’s cabin. Not much has changed. The wind is screaming outside again, scouring at the roof, leaching the warmth out into the freezing air. The snow is like sand against his face if he steps outside even for a moment. It’s still dark. He’s eaten the same food, again, and drank the same drinks. He has sat at the table by the stove, sewing his Christmas tree.

That, perhaps, is something to be proud of. It’s big enough to suit the size of the three rag dolls. Big enough that he can pretend it’s their tree to sit around. They can sing carols or hymns or whatever people sing at this time. They can exchange gifts.

It’s all ridiculous. They’re dolls made from leftover pieces of cloth. They’re no more alive than the tree that’s taking shape under his hands. But it’s a good tree. He has pieced it out with a rectangle of brown for the trunk, and angular spears of different greens for the branches. It takes a long time to sew each one, but it reminds him of his grandmother, making a patchwork quilt. He follows her example, finding matter to stuff into the pouches of each segment, so, when finished, the tree will have stiffness, and will be able to stand up as long as it’s leant against a wall.

One pointed branch is patterned with green flowers. One is printed with leaves. One is plain, another plaid. He’s proud of it, despite himself. When it’s finished, he can decorate it somehow. There are bits of foil here in the hut. There are bits of paper. He will be able to decorate it, and then he can celebrate Christmas, just him and the girls, those rag girls who never speak.

 _Christ, Napoleon, I’m going mad_ , he thinks. He doesn’t dare write that down. He’s afraid it’s true, though. The constant dark. The solitude. The loneliness. The howling of the wind. He feels desperate for something to cling to, like a child with a doll. Something good, something hopeful.

The tree is hopeful. It doesn’t mean escape from the cabin, but it does mean escape from the ordinary.

  
  


((O))

  
  


Day eleven, day twelve, day thirteen. They pass one after another, with the wind screaming, the voices of the storm howling outside. The wind makes the cabin shudder. Illya sits by the stove with the lamp lit, sewing. The tree is finished, and it sits on the shelf, propped up, with the girls – the _dolls_ , he must remind himself – either side of it. Maria and Marguerite and Diana. The three sisters. He must make Maria her clothes. She must be dressed for Christmas.

Day fourteen, day fifteen. The snow never lets up. Illya has long given up on the radio. It’s a useless heap of junk. He sits by the stove and sews, instead. Square little presents stuffed with fur and tied with ribbons. Baubles for the tree, to go with the bits of foil he’s already pinned on.

He wonders if he could start on a quilt. Maybe he can remember some of the patterns his grandmother made. He remembers that quilt that was laid over his bed, growing up. It’s a sense memory; his fingers tracing the lines of the stitches, feeling the fatness of the stuffing. His eyes moving from pattern to pattern on each scrap of fabric, from colour to colour. The warmth of his body rising into the insulating layer, and being sent back down to cocoon him. He can almost smell it, in his memory. That scent of fabric that had absorbed coal and tobacco smoke, and the light scent of sweat.

He looks up at the shelf, where he has his patchwork Christmas tree and its patchwork decorations, and the dolls on either side, smiling their empty smiles. He had been humming a seasonal tune as he worked. For a moment, just for a moment, he sees himself as his grandmother, with her small round glasses and her shawl pulled tightly around her shoulders, her somehow formless body shaped into the chair.

He blinks. He isn’t his grandmother at all. For a start, he doesn’t have her glasses, or even his own. He had to hold the needle at arm’s length to thread it every time, until he found a small filament of wire and made it into a needle threader. He stitches almost blind, pushing the needle into the blurred fabric edge, then holds it out to check, then brings it close again to sew.

He likes Maria’s smile best, of the three dolls. Crooked as it is, it seems more real. The other two girls are cold and blank faced. Maria is endearing, as his own eight year old daughter might be, if he had one.

There’s a little ache in his chest, just for a moment. How much of life he’s missing, by living the life he does. No wife, no smiling little girls or boys. Here he is, stuck in this isolated little cabin, with the wind screaming outside. Nothing but the darkness and the snow and the wind.

He must start on Maria’s clothes. She’s still in her felt shawl, and her sisters are well-dressed, superior and aloof. She needs her own clothes, and he must have practised enough now, at the sewing. The tree is splendid. The little presents are perfect.

He lays out the scraps he had chosen days ago, that he had set aside and not touched in his other sewing ventures. He looks at the other dolls’ dresses, and thinks about this one. He carefully cuts out the shapes. Pink with red flowers for her dress. White for the apron. There’s a little lace, lost in the bottom of the scrap bag. That can be her collar.

He feels like an elf in a story, sitting at the table in the glow of the lamp. Words dance in his head, torn away from some story and set adrift in his mind. _One single skein of cherry-coloured twisted silk…_ Where is that from? He can’t remember, but he thinks of Christmas and snow and sewing, late at night. Sven is sleeping, just sleeping outside in his chair. While he sleeps, Illya will finish the doll. It’s Christmas Eve, he thinks. A dark Christmas Eve, with the storm howling outside. He sits at the table and measures and cuts and sews and sews and sews.

  
  


((O))

  
  


_Day sixteen_ , he writes. He hasn’t written for days, but he has put a mark in the book, so as not to lose track. _It’s Christmas Day, if I’ve counted right. I suppose there are children waking up excited. I suppose they think Santa Claus has come, massive capitalist swindle that he is. The parents have been waiting for the children to go to sleep. They’ve put little things in stockings or sacks, and laid them on their beds, or hung them on the ends of the mantle piece. I have my Christmas tree on my mantle piece, and my girls._

 _My girls…_ He regards them. Marguerite, so prim. Diana, her glance a little skewed, her clothes clean and perfect. And little Maria. She’s dressed at last. He was pushing the needle in and out of the cloth at midnight, just finishing off the final bit of lace to trim the collar. He took her down from the shelf and carefully eased her into the dress, tied the apron around her waist, and smoothed down her hair.

He feels a ridiculous tenderness for her. He has been sent mad by the isolation, to feel tenderness for this thing made of cloth and sheep’s wool. But there it is. Her dress is perfect, her smile is crooked but real.

He lifts her from the shelf and holds her in his hands. He wonders about the little girls for whom Sven was making these dolls. The girls in the photographs. He thinks about the woman with her spun sugar blonde hair and her smile. They are waking up on Christmas morning, have probably already woken, without Sven in their lives. They are alone.

He presses the little doll to his chest. He pulls on his coat and boots and goes out into the porch. There Sven is, frozen solid, rigid in his chair. Illya crouches down in front of him, the doll held against his chest, the lamp in his hand. Sven is immobile and unresponsive. His eyes are dull stones. He is so, so dead.

‘Well, I’ll get them to your family, if I can,’ he says. ‘They can have the tree, the decorations, everything. I’ll look after them for you, I promise.’

He still doesn’t know the man’s real name. He knows nothing about him. He is a frozen husk. There’s nothing there.

He takes in a breath, and sets the lamp down on the floor. He opens the door, because it’s quiet out there. The windows were rimed with snow when he woke, and there was only darkness behind that thin crust, but the wind has fallen. So he opens the door and looks out into the snow, and –

The sky is alive with ribbons of light. It’s clear from horizon to horizon, punctuated with blazing stars, and above him, dizzying, waxing and waning and swaying across the sky, there are ethereal ribbons of milky white, tinted with rose, with weird green. He stands there, head tilted back, neck exposed to the freezing air, just staring. The lights make him feel dizzy, but they’re beautiful. They’re unreal. Even in the presence of them, he feels that they can’t be real. They are real ribbons in the sky, as if the Earth has been wrapped for Christmas Day.

‘Illya!’

The shout is clear as bells across the snow. His heart gives a snap, like a gunshot going off inside his chest. There’s a figure there, so wrapped up he could be anyone. It’s a man holding a flash light and struggling through the snow. But he knows the voice. Of course he knows the voice.

Napoleon is there in a few strides, his boots crunching in the snow with a sound just on the edge of nails on blackboards. How had he not heard that noise before? He had been so intent on the lights in the sky.

‘Merry Christmas, Illya,’ Napoleon says.

Napoleon’s arms are around his partner, pulling him tight in against him. There’s so much thick clothing between the two of them that all Illya can feel is pressure and cold.

‘I see you’ve staked your claim,’ Napoleon says, releasing his friend, nodding up at the flag nailed to the porch.

‘Of course I have. Come inside,’ Illya tells him, and he turns back to the porch.

‘Christ, Illya!’ Napoleon says as soon as he steps through the door.

There is Sven, frozen in his chair, the oil lamp on the floor lighting him from below. Illya has grown so used to him being there.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Napoleon says. ‘He almost gave me a heart attack. Is that Dr Berntsen?’

‘Oh,’ Illya says. ‘Is that what he’s called? I called him Sven.’

He opens the inner door quickly, because it’s freezing in the porch. The warmth from inside hits him. His ears and cheeks and hands are burning with cold, and they burn harder in the warm air as he takes Napoleon inside.

‘Torvald Berntsen,’ Napoleon says, pulling down the coverings from over his mouth and nose. It’s so good to see a human face that Illya just stares. ‘The only person in this place we couldn’t get through to by radio or in person, not while the storms held out. We knew you’d been dumped somewhere in this area and he was our last hope. Did he – When did he die?’

‘I don’t know,’ Illya shrugs. In an odd way it feels as if he never had been dead, or as if he had been dead forever. ‘He was dead when I got here. Died in his sleep, by the looks of things.’

He keeps staring at Napoleon’s face, at his real, solid form. He’s here, he’s alive. He flings his arms around him again and hugs him just as hard as before, feeling that he’s no apparition, no corpse. It’s so good to no longer be alone.

‘It’s good to see you too, but be careful of your pretty friend,’ Napoleon says slyly, when Illya lets go again.

Illya is still holding Maria. He flushes a little, but when he puts her down he sets her very carefully on the shelf between the other dolls.

‘Quite a party you’ve been having,’ Napoleon says, eyeing the decorations. ‘Were these already – ’

‘The dolls were here,’ Illya says, still with heat in his cheeks. He is trying very hard not to sound defensive. ‘I made the rest. I was bored.’

‘Oh,’ Napoleon says, giving him an arch look. ‘Well, I never would have guessed. The little one’s your favourite, is she? Lucky girl.’

‘That one wasn’t finished,’ he says quickly. ‘I think Sven – Dr Berntsen – must have been making them for his daughters, so I finished her off, and one thing led to another...’

‘Daughters?’ Napoleon asks. ‘Illya, he doesn’t have any daughters.’

Illya glances instinctively towards the box under the bed, where the photographs are.

‘Well, nieces, maybe? He has a sister, then.’

Napoleon shakes his head. ‘He didn’t have a soul in the world, Illya. He was the local oddball, apparently. Used to come into town to sell his furs, and stop into the junk shop and buy photos and all sorts. Collected rags from the women and made things out of them. No family. No children. No sister. Just him and his cabin.’

‘Oh.’

He doesn’t know what to do. What to do with Maria, with Marguerite and Diana? He had imagined bearing the news to Sven’s wife, consoling her with these little gifts the man had made. All those letters, the photographs. All of them are nothing. The man must have been so lonely. He suddenly feels lost.

‘Did you get here on foot?’ he asks Napoleon.

‘You’re only a few miles from town, Illya,’ Napoleon tells him. ‘But you wouldn’t have been able to see the lights through the hills, and the storms were too bad until now for anyone to make it out here, or for you to get back to the town. Forecast is clear for the next few days. It’s a good window of peace. Spectacular for the light show, too.’

‘They’re beautiful,’ Illya murmurs.

There really is no way to describe the northern lights, and this display feels like something extra. It’s as if they brought Napoleon here, like some kind of faery force.

‘I thought was going to have Christmas alone, but I haven’t started cooking yet,’ he says. ‘Would you like to join me?’

Napoleon smiles, and it’s as if the sun has come up in the room.

‘I would love to join you,’ he says. He unzips his jacket, shrugs it off, and tosses it over the back of a chair. ‘Are there vegetables to peel?’

Illya snorts. ‘Only if by peeling you mean removing the can from around the outside. I was going to bring in a hunk of meat from outside, and there’s plenty of alcohol. I hadn’t planned much more than that.’

‘It’s enough,’ Napoleon says. ‘Meat and drink with my friend on Christmas Day. It’s more than enough.’

  
  


((O))

  
  


Day seventeen. Morning. The sky is still dark, pierced with stars. It’s still dark, but it feels so different, because now Napoleon is here. There’s another voice. A person to turn to, with whom to exchange a smile or a joke. A person to talk to.

The snow crunches underfoot outside the trapper’s hut, frozen to a crust by the vicious cold. In the sky the aurora is streaming again, slipping and pulsing and flicking above the black silhouettes of the mountains. Some say it’s a portent of doom, but to Illya it’s a portent of everything good; clear skies, light, rescue. The light reflects in a ghostly way on the snow, light which is almost unreal, hard to believe in. Illya’s and Napoleon’s breath freezes in the air, coming out in little clouds.

Illya looks up through the spreading pearl droplets of their living breath, and watches the aurora as it dances in the sky.

‘Beautiful,’ Napoleon says, and Illya says, ‘Yes.’

It’s like being taken by the hand and led from a fairy tale back into reality. It’s hard to believe they’re so close to the town.

In the space left in Napoleon’s backpack Illya has carefully packed the three dolls, wrapped in the Soviet flag, and the journal kept first by Sven, and then by himself. They aren’t necessary things for a journey of a few miles across a snowy waste, but they’re necessary to him. His new year’s resolution is to learn to speak Norwegian. He has an aptitude for languages.

Illya pulls up the layers of scarves over his mouth, and pats Napoleon on the shoulder.

‘It’s a good little home, but shall we get underway?’ he asks.

‘Sooner the better,’ Napoleon says economically. ‘The weather was supposed to hold fair, but I don’t want to take any chances.’

‘No,’ Illya replies.

‘It won’t take more than five hours,’ Napoleon says. ‘It’s not that far, but it’s hard walking through this snow. We have to get over the shoulder of the mountain.’

‘I feel a little foolish,’ Illya admits. ‘Holed up, so close to civilisation.’

‘Don’t,’ Napoleon says tartly. ‘There’s nothing half so foolish as dying of exposure.’

He’s right, of course. It would have been a foolish thing to play with, trying this journey in bad weather, or even trying it when the weather was good, not knowing which way to go. It’s easy to set out feeling strong, and then find that the cold has seeped in through every layer, that your hands and feet have lost feeling, that your mind has become sluggish. Simple decisions of left and right become impossible. Napoleon has brought all the tools of navigation, and he knows the way. He’s a light guiding Illya homeward.

  
  


((O))

  
  


_Civilisation at last_ , Illya writes in the journal, safe in the hotel bar. _I’ve brought this journal back with me. Is that stealing? It sounds as if poor Sven – poor Dr Berntsen – doesn’t have anyone who will miss it. I want to find out more about him. It’s a while before the next plane leaves, so I’m determined to talk to the locals and find out what he was like. I’ll keep trying to translate this journal. He must have been making those dolls for a reason. He must have hoarded those photographs and letters for a reason. He was either a very lonely man, or there is someone, somewhere, who misses him._

_Longyearbyen is a pretty little place. At least, it’s pretty when you’ve been isolated for over a fortnight. There are lights in all the low little buildings. Footprints in the snow on the streets. You can hear people talking. You can hear the motors of cars. Someone has run up lights on a tree, and somehow it stands the blizzards. That’s why we have lights at this time of year, of course. It gives us hope._

_It’s the company that’s best of all. I’ve never been a social being, but there’s something terrible about being so utterly alone. I wonder if half the men in this little hotel bar are alcoholics, but there’s a camaraderie that’s as warming as a hot drink. Everyone knows everyone else. When another man walks in he’s greeted loudly and invited to sit. Napoleon is sitting across the table from me, drinking his wine, and humming. The humming is driving me a little mad, but it’s also making me very, very happy. I am not alone. We are not alone._

‘Busy?’ Napoleon asks, and Illya sets his pen down.

‘Not exactly busy.’

The windows shake in a sudden woof of wind. He glances over to see the ice and snow of another blizzard scudding against the glass. The howling noises are starting again. They got back from the cabin just in time. Sven is still out there, frozen stiff, with the wrack of his life around him. Someone will go out there when the weather starts to improve. Someone will give him a proper burial. It feels odd, though, to leave everything there.

‘Another drink?’ Napoleon asks.

‘Thank you,’ Illya says. Wine will help ease the dark little feelings that creep in when he thinks of Sven’s fate.

Napoleon clinks the neck of the wine bottle against the rim of Illya’s glass, and the rich red liquid swirls in, catching amber from the lights in the bar. It’s not wine to rival the best New York can offer, but it’s good enough.

‘I vote we demolish this bottle and then get something to eat,’ Napoleon says. ‘Are you hungry, huh?’

Illya smiles. After the long walk through the freezing dark, he is ravenous, even after a solid meal as soon as they got in.

‘Of course I’m hungry,’ he says.

‘Good.’

Napoleon nods in satisfaction, but he doesn’t make a move for the dining room. He just sits with his glass between his hands, regarding his partner. He’s very still and silent, until Illya says, ‘What?’

Napoleon jerks back to life, and turns his glass in his hands.

‘It’s good to have you back,’ he tells Illya. ‘I was just thinking, that it’s good to have you back. I’ve been alone here for the last few weeks, looking for you. I’ve missed your company.’

‘Yes,’ Illya says slowly.

He had missed Napoleon so much since they parted weeks and weeks ago, somewhere south of Oslo. He had thought he was going to die quite a few times, and he hadn’t died. Then he had found himself marooned in that house, and he had thought again that he was going to die, miles from any living soul. But he hadn’t died, because Napoleon had come to find him.

‘I’ve missed you too,’ he admits, looking at his wine rather than at Napoleon’s face. Then he looks up quickly, and smiles. It’s worth seeing Napoleon’s face. It’s worth meeting his eyes. ‘I missed you. Thank you for bringing me home.’


End file.
